Posts tagged with Mobile Search

More than any other industry, bars and restaurants are perfectly positioned to take advantage of the boom in smartphone use.

Decisions on dining are often made on the spur of the moment so by having a simple mobile site with a booking tool and click-to-call button restaurants will put themselves in the best position to attract some extra customers.

A new report form JiWire has found that consumers are twice as likely to use mobile than desktop as a source of information about where to eat.

To find out whether restaurants are making the most of this opportunity I searched for places to eat around the Econsultancy office in London’s Soho.

It’s a prime tourist spot that’s also home to thousands of office workers, so there’s plenty of money to be made keeping all those people fed.

Google and Ipsos have published new research intended to detail the use of click-to-call in mobile search.

The results show that almost half of those surveyed (42%) had used click-to-call in search, with the need to talk to a real person stated as the main motivation. Other motivations included ‘wanting answers more quickly’ and ‘needing more information than a website could provide’.

Of smartphone users, a massive 94% have needed to call a business directly when searching for information, whether click-to-call is available or not.

Google has a unique perspective on much of the mobile customer journey with search, Maps, Chrome, Places, click-to-call, Wallet, to name a few.

Google ads drive 40m calls a month and with in-search features growing more on desktop and smartphone, customers are using them more and more. The research showed 47% were aware of additional information displayed in search results.

Here are some more findings from the research and an additional click-to-call case study from sk:n clinics.

Mobile commerce is no longer the newcomer to the digital scene, but it is likely to remain one of the main challenges for businesses for the foreseeable future.

Ever-increasing levels of smartphone and tablet ownership in the US means that businesses have no choice but to adapt to accommodate the ensuing rise in mobile web traffic, however some sites (including our own) are still lagging behind.

So just to reiterate the importance of mobile commerce I've rounded up more than 50 of the best stats from surveys and reports that we've seen in the past 12 months.

Mobile is often cited as the glue that holds together the multichannel experience as the technology is able to bridge the gap between in-store and online channels.

And it tends to be the retailers that were quick to embrace mobile technologies – such as local search or a mobile optimised site - that have continued to thrive and stay in tune with consumer behaviours.

For example, the new Econsultancy Multichannel Retail Survey shows that 44% of smartphone owners have used their mobile to find details about a retailer (e.g. nearest outlet or opening times), up from 32% in 2012.

Restaurants and food outlets are among the businesses that stand to benefit most from the boom in mobile search, as dining out is often an impulse decision made while on-the-go.

In a recent survey of nearly 1,500 smartphone users by SinglePlatform, 81% of consumers reported that they searched for a restaurant in the past six months using a mobile app, while 92% did so through the mobile web.

Furthermore, three-quarters of the consumers who searched for a restaurant with a mobile phone chose a restaurant based on search results.

Off the back of these findings, here are seven ways in which restaurants can take advantage of mobile...

If you don’t implement a planned migration there’s a risk you could be wasting budget and not getting the most out of your search advertising.

For those advertisers who remain unsure: the essence of enhanced campaigns is that instead of advertisers having to duplicate their effort by managing multiple campaigns in order to target individual devices (desktops, tablets and smartphones), Google has introduced a streamlined format to manage multi device targeting within a single campaign.

Mobile search is an increasingly important area for ecommerce businesses as Google has stated that mobile queries are likely to overtake desktop queries by next year.

And new data from Covario shows that the level of investment in mobile paid search is slowly catching up with consumer behaviour.

On a global basis mobile search advertising accounted for 16% of total spend in Q2, of which 10% was spent on tablet and 6% on smartphone.

This represents an increase of 39% compared to Q1 2013 and a massive 132% increase year-on-year.

CPC prices varied significantly depending on the mobile platform. CPCs on smartphones remained at a 40% discount to desktop CPCs, but have increased nearly every quarter for the last five quarters – with the exception of Q4 2012.